GYSO Drawing Part 28 - Fail In Perpetual Cycles

Published: 2020-03-15

Introduction

Thor: Woohoo! It’s here, it’s finally here! The one year anniversary of Get Your Skills On dot com! You didn’t think we’d make it here, and we sure didn’t think we’d make it here. Over a grueling few hours, me and my co-hort Tim looked through the year worth of material we have, and made some reflections. This entire post is one big post-mortem or reflection on those things. Initially, I would just like to say that it all started falling apart when Tim drew the reference picture. So what do you say, you melon felons? Let’s get our asses discovering what a macaroni skunk really looks like.

Tim:
“getyourskillson.com”

It’s strange to think that we’re here in the one year anniversary of GYSO. There’s some part of me that still can’t understand the sheer girth of this blog. According to my calculations, we’re currently just over 60,000 words long; that’s basically a normal novel.

And yet, looking back, I find myself having to come to terms with the fact that this is something I actually participated in. I keep wanting to tell myself that its just total shit, and doesn’t even matter; yet I know that I wouldn’t be the person I am right now, if it wasn’t for the previous year.

I’ll say it outright: I’m grateful.

Thanks to this blog I’ve became inspired to write professionally. I now spend nearly all of my free time writing, and it’s been more fulfilling than anything I’ve ever done. I’ve made my own writing website, timtimestim.com, which is something I’ve wanted to do since I was a child. I don’t think I would’ve had the courage to do it without this blog, and for that I’m grateful.

Thanks to this blog I’ve grown closer to my good friend and co-writer, Thor. I value our friendship far more than I had, and I trust him far more than I had. Without his constant presence I wouldn’t have gotten the right push to go down the path of writing, and for that I’m grateful.

Thanks to this blog I’ve learned how to trust myself more. A consistent uplifting and fun project like this works wonders for my self-esteem, and for that I’m grateful.

Thanks to this blog I’ve found a voice. I stumbled upon a style of writing that I sincerely love to produce, and I got the courage to look at it and say, “I can do better. I want to do better.” If I hadn’t had such a secure place to experiment I wouldn’t have gotten this far, and for that I’m grateful.

Thanks to this blog I’ve found ambition. I’m no longer floating through life without a goal. I actually have a vision for the future, and for that I’m grateful.

Thanks to this blog I’ve gotten the chance to back up and reflect on a year’s worth of growth, and for that I’m grateful.

What went right?

Thor: For the things that I want to reflect over positively, I’m going to have to skip the chronological order, and go straight to Post 7 – Melon.

Part 7 - Melon what the fuck was I smoking? I had really embraced your wackiness, Tim. He was spreading his juice on top of me, so to speak.

Part 8 – Pastiche Just read it. What’s interesting to me is how we already at post 8 had started meta-referencing ourselves with the melon picture and the lorem ipusm thing. I never finished that musicology book. Also, Tim did the grunt work on this, but it’s a legendary post.

Part 9 – My Boy this holds a very special place in my heart. The Henry William story is beautiful, I’ve started really understanding that I don’t have to draw for GYSO, and I’m finding my voice within that. It’s a condensed version of what GYSO looks like when it’s SFW. It was a lesson in how I could riff off of what Tim writes.

Part 11 we start calling the blog things. I have a tendency of thanking people who read. I’m going to show this to all my future lovers.

The thing that happened parts 12-13 is so special. Our ghost writer in Part 12 – Ghost said I would keep drawing but instead I stopped up until Hangman, if that even constitutes as drawing. Part 13 – gyso.el is also when we grow fully aware of the following golden age of GYSO would happen. The want went wrong section is legendary.

Part 15 – China and forward, I start getting unmotivated and depressed. It’s a beautiful time in my life, as this is at a severe downswing in my mental health, and GYSO acts as basically my only outlet. My anxiety over practicing, perfecting, and performing music has me stuck in a deep hole. I remember I had just moved into the dorms and I was so mad that there no actual bowls, just deep plates, because I’m used to eating literally everything from bowls because it’s a more preferable utensil to eat from in every situation. In my perspective of GYSO, this is another turning point post, and I’m taking the lead.

Part 16 – Krampus is a wonderful Christmas post. It’s impossible to describe. Also some recurrent phrasings and content from here that I sneak in subtly at times. The Pavlovian dog is a favorite of mine.

For posts 18-19 It was really fun getting one of my sisters involved. The sheer absurdity of having this eccentric American going at you for not giving away your social security number was terrible for people with a severe naïve dynamic as our family does. If anyone is actually into GYSO, I would love if you could get in touch so that we could interview you of things that you think about GYSO. Noreas solo post, Blue Yarn holds a beautiful place in my heart, as it showed me not just how capable she is as a writer. But also showed me that GYSO is, just as she was suggesting in the interview, just a way of phrasing yourself, a sort of writing mindset, the act of turning your eccentric absurdities and skin moles that you have hiding inside, inside-out. Anyone can embrace the GYSO spirit if you are open enough to receive it. So far, none of my friends are reading.

The rest of posts up until now are ironically pretty consistent and un-wacky in their wacky-ness. We kind of settled into eccentricism but without the super weird MLP porn-pseudo-referencing and getting into too many hot headed paragraphs about how cool it is that we can extrapolate some insane story about an old English king or a single word. But there’s still the absurdity of writing a couple hundred words in a single sentence, playing Hangman, me writing Tim’s section, and vice versa.

Tim:
Look at me, seriously using the “What went right?” section to actually talk about what’s gone right. That’s right, my right to write what went right is right here.

Let’s just cut to the cheese chase and ask the important question: What’s the best GYSO post?

It could be the first one, since it holds so much significance. “It all started falling apart when Tim drew the reference picture” is actually spot on, since I wasn’t able to take the drawing thing seriously after drawing it. Still, if you look at it from a quality perspective, it’s not even close to the best post.

It could be Part 8, “Pastiche”, where I rant about superfluous sheds and macaroni skunks. It also had a personal significance to me, since its where I really started to find my voice. I’m proud to say that I feel like I could have done the post better, and it’s probably not the best one.

What about Part 9, “My Boy”? Where I introduce my favorite character, Goopy Droopy. I had so much fun with this post, and Thor’s contributions were stellar here. A classic, for sure, but I’m not sure if it’s the best.

We could discuss Part 14, “I Love You”, where we review the 2017 My Little Pony movie. This post is legendary for many reasons, one of them being that its our longest post to date, clocking in at nearly twice the average length of a normal post. This is also the first “mental breakdown” present in GYSO, which set the tone for quite a few post later down the line. Still, it kinda drags on, and isn’t super focused.

I consider Part 15 and 16, “China” and “Krampus”, to be thematically contiguous. They’re both dominated by Thor’s vague-but-relatable self-loathing depressive ranting, while I’m in the background complaining or experimenting with stories. These post are great, but a little incoherent.

I couldn’t forget Part 19, “Blockquote”, where we turned into journalist and gave an exclusive GYSO interview to Thor’s older sister. There isn’t much wrong with this post, and in fact it was a difficult decision to decide that there was a better one. It’s genuinely fantastic and funny, and I enjoyed the process of making it quite a bit. It will always hold a place in my heart.

No. There’s one post I consider to be better than the rest, if just by a small margin: Part 23, “Sing Along”. Sing Along isn’t the most cohesive, it isn’t the funniest, it isn’t the longest or the most dense, and it isn’t even the best named post. What makes this one stand out, though, is that it’s interactive. This post is something you can go to a party with and have a laugh with your friends. I even have proof of this in the form of a recorded read aloud Thor did with some of his buddies; there were laughs everywhere and it was fantastic. This isn’t just a funny post where two people rant into their drawing blog, its a post that you can use to bond with others through mutual laughter (awkward or otherwise).

I’ve already talked about all the positive effects this blog has had on my life, so let’s get to the juicy stuff: self deprication!

What went wrong?

Thor: Even listening to Tim reading the really old posts give me severe anxiety, I’m starting to sweat, and my legs are shaking like crazy in pure nervousness. Of course, that’s also some fallacy of thinking that old material represents the new you, perfectionism and whatnot. Change is okay, and that’s exactly what this sanity-abandoned blog shows me time and time again. I despise the image I portrayed of myself in the earliest posts. I was shallow and more insecure and was not having fun and was just feeding into my own performance anxiety and perfectionism. Today I have regained my ability to read masks, and by extension, I genuinely mourn for the total overwhelming pain and shallow motivations the old me was living with daily. Of course, I don’t mean to imply that I’ve fixed it now, but today I have the perspective to see just how much it was affecting me.

I remember the jealousy of reading what Tim wrote every other week. The jealousy of someone that not only drew better, or at least more confidently, but who also took it less seriously. There’s something utterly devastating about watching a person doing what you want to do, without even trying. It’s obviously deeply connected to my relationship to music, which is pretty close to my core value as a human being, if you remember my perfectionism I mentioned earlier.

In a way, most posts from 18 or so forward has been kind of filler content, some experimental stuff like Totally Normal, and then nothing major. Hangman and the read aloud post, religion, Usain Bolt are all just some specific application of some literary technique. I’ve actually read Sing Along aloud a time and it was very special and I would like to thank everyone who was present, listening for the entire 15 minute monologue. Every day I appreciate that moment more and more. But it’s part of a bigger-picture GYSO development of settling into the excitedly unexpected.

Tim:
The most obvious thing that’s gone wrong is the original intent of this blog: to learn drawing.

I know it sounds absurd to say, given the current state of things, but Thor and I really did go into this expecting to learn drawing. There wasn’t any plan to derail it like this and turn it into… GYSO.

In that sense, we failed completely. We set out to learn how to draw, and yet we skirted that responsibility. I still say that the idea of learning new skills and documenting the learning process is a fantastic idea for a blog, it’s just that we couldn’t do it.

GYSO is better being what it is now, but I still sort of mourn the loss of what it could have been.

Another core issue of GYSO is how Thor and I collaborate. As it stands, nearly every post reads like two separate blog post slid together like a shuffled deck of cards. Sometimes this works well, but most of the time its just disorienting and weird. It works for this post, since we’re talking about our personal feelings, but I think that we can drastically improve on the whole “two people writing a blog” thing.

It was a mistake to make the blog a WordPress blog, and our choice of web host was bad too. WordPress sucks more ass than a red ass baboon, and Blue Host makes me sad. I know more about web hosting and web development now, and I wish I could go back in time and tell my past self to only get the 1 year web hosting plan, instead of the 3 year one. As it stands, I pretty much have to stick with this shitty WordPress x Blue Host combo until the contract runs out.

I tried to take advantage of the WordPress thing by making a “it’s just the default WordPress theme, lol!” joke about the whole website. It just kinda falls flat, to be honest. The vulnerabilities and shitty design of WordPress aren’t worth the trouble of such a stupid ass joke.

Most of our old posts, and a few of our middle posts, are… awful. Like, really really bad. They’re so awful that both Thor and I cringe at them, if for different reasons. The issue lies in the fact that new readers will want to read the first post of the blog, and that the first posts simply don’t compare to what we can now put out. It’s embarrassing.

We could go back and edit them, or just delete them and make a new “introduction” post, but that just feels wrong. Our beginnings are an important part of GYSO’s history; I just wish they didn’t have to suck so much.

A pandemic issue in GYSO is grammar and spelling. I’m not great at grammar, and I don’t re-read the post thoroughly enough to really catch every little issue. I’m in charge of spelling and grammar correction, and I’ve totally failed in that responsibility on multiple occasions.

Luckily, this is something I can improve on. This is an issue with my own writings as well, which means that any study I do into editing and grammar for my own works will translate directly into a better experience reading GYSO. Grammar is the foundation of writing, and its important. I hope by a year’s time I’ll be able to say, “And I really improved on grammar! It’s so much better now!”

And here’s the sensitive topic: Thor and I have differing priorities when it comes to GYSO.

Thor’s a musician, that’s his passion and his life. I’m an author, and I spend a massive amount of time writing and thinking about writing.

I use this blog as a “proving ground” for writing ideas. I’m trying, desperately, to become a better writer, and I try to make everything I put out as high quality as I can manage. If writing is my passion, than I obviously want to use this blog as a springboard for getting better at it.

Thor uses this blog as a blog. It’s a place to talk and think about his life, or a place to unwind and write something silly without any worry. That’s because his passion is music, and not writing. To ask Thor to take writing as seriously as I’m doing would be a slap in the face of what he truly wants to do in life.

Obviously Thor isn’t a bad writer for this blog. He can come up with great ideas and write them in interesting ways, which is all that’s needed for a blog.

It’s just that our priorities are different.

I once tried to learn how to make music, with Thor as my teacher. I learned a bit, but I lost the desire to practice as time went on. I feel that Thor might be feeling the same way I might have felt, if I had been forced to continue learning music even when I didn’t want to.

We want to grow in different directions and into different domains. I feel like this makes a really silent friction in the way we write for this blog, and I’ve got no idea how to fix it. I know there’s gotta be a super clever solution somewhere out there, but I can’t for the life of me figure it out.

I want to keep writing GYSO, and I want to do it with my good friend Thor. I also want to make sure that we both enjoy writing it to the fullest extent we can manage while also making it the best it can possibly be. Right now I think our differing priorities and ideas are holding us back instead of combining to create something better than the sum of its parts.

…

Well. That happened.

Even with all this, my feelings about GYSO in the past year are mostly positive. I really had to dig deep into my insecurities to dredge up some of these examples, and I’m not even sure if the last issue is even something to worry about.

Let’s move on to the next section before I explode.

What happens next?

Thor: We seem to be on a new track with Positivity and Beans, taking a more laid-back, reality-centered way of writing. That excites me, as I’ve lost a lot of interest for the weird-for-the-sake-of-weird ideas that we brainstorm together. The most beautiful posts have been naturally occurring out of slowly building drafts, discussing our weeks and other subjects, seeping into legendary phrases and stories that get referenced practically daily by the GYSO team internally.

Where would I be without GYSO? Probably less close to Tim. Less proud of myself. Less confident in my abilities to do things. Less inclined to accept that projects and results can be just what they are. That is, I would be more romanticizing of the creative process and kept glorifying the holy creative output that every other person that isn’t me has.

Strangely, despite being in music education I find myself listening only to music I’ve listened to probably hundreds of times before, instead of exploring new things. The really weird stuff starts happening when I put on my melodic hardcore jam of choice, Counterpart’s album The Difference Between Hell and Home, and in the span of two days, that album has taken me through the revitalization and symbolism of my teenage angst. But then, with life events, I start hearing and feeling the light that got me through my teenage wish for the sweet release of death.

Tim:
This is the “What Happens Next” section, and this time I’ll actually use it for that purpose! I know, right? This section has become the “few sentence outro” part of our posts, but not this time.

Where do we go from here? I don’t fuckin know.

Anticlimactic? Yes. But its also true. GYSO is such a volatile thing that I can’t even predict where it’ll go on a week-by-week basis, let alone how we’re gonna navigate the next year.

I do plan on solving some, if not most, of the problems I brought up in the “What Went Wrong” section. I also plan on fleshing own writing website.

We’ve got something huge in the works that we can’t really talk about right now, but that’s probably not going to come to fruition until after next year, if not later. Still, its going to be taking a lot of my attention for most of that time.

Other than that, I’m just gonna keep moving along. I’m proud of this project, even with all its rough edges. I can safely say that this has changed my life, and I’m excited to see where it’ll take me next.

Here’s to year two of Get Your Skills On, a blog about drawing (and some other things).